Transcendence (23 page)

Mom makes a move to touch my shoulder but I shake her off, so she takes a step away from the bed. “You know you don’t mean that,” she says, struggling to keep her voice even. “I know how upsetting this is. We’ll get the best therapist in the city and begin right away. If you want to be truly world-class, you can’t afford to lose too much ground, or else—”

“You’re not listening, Mom!” I shout. “You have to accept the reality that it might be over. I might never play again.” Even as I say the words, I try not to concentrate on them, to fully comprehend that I might never pick up a bow again.

“You listen to me,” she says. “You
are
special. You’ve always been special. Cello has been your destiny ever since you were a tiny child, and we’ve done everything we can to make that your reality.”

“Well, it looks like destiny has other ideas now,” I say.

Mom is just gearing up for a repeat performance about my wasted talents when there’s another knock on the door.

“Can I come in?” Rayne asks from out in the hallway. I can’t tell if she’s overheard us or not.

“Please,” I call out. Mom seems to deflate into the chair by the window, aware that our “discussion” is over, at least for the moment.

“How’s it going?” Rayne asks, stepping further into the room, her eyes flickering momentarily to my bandaged hand and then to my face.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I get out of here today.”

“Awesome,” she says, bending down to give me an awkward hug. “What time?”

I glance at Mom. “Did he say what time?”

“No,” she says. “Probably before dinner, I’d imagine.” She stands up. “I’m going to get the nurse to start the paperwork so that it doesn’t take all day.”

I breathe a sigh of relief once she’s gone and the door has thunked closed. “Mom wants me to stay home all week, but I can’t wait for things to get back to normal,” I say. “I’ll probably miss school again tomorrow, but I might be able to go back on Wednesday.”

“Good,” Rayne says. She looks back at my arm again. “Is it going to be back to normal?”

“Sure,” I say, sounding more confident than I feel. “It just might take a little while to get all of the feeling back in my fingers. It’ll be fine.”

“Will you be able to … play anymore?”

“I don’t know,” I say, trying to sound indifferent. “And if I can’t, who cares? You’re the one who’s always saying there’s more to life than practice. Maybe I need to take a break.”

Rayne studies my face. “Yeah, but
forever
? You can’t give up on your gift.”

“So now you’re on Mom’s side too?”

Rayne sits down on the edge of the bed. “I’m not taking a side.” She grins. “Especially your mom’s. But there must be a reason that you’re so good at cello. I’m not good at anything, but if I was, I’d make the most of it.”

If she only knew how close she is to the truth. The reason I was so good at cello. I realize that I’m already thinking about it in the past tense. Something I
used
to do. Something that used to define who I was. And for the first time since I woke up and saw Griffon sitting by the bed, tears spill over my lids and down my face before I can do anything to stop them.

“Oh crappity crap crap,” Rayne says, lunging for the tissue box and handing it to me. “I totally didn’t mean to do that.”

“It’s not your fault,” I say, losing myself completely into blubber mode now. “It’s just something I have to deal with.”

“But maybe it will be okay,” she says eagerly. “They can do amazing things these days. Maybe it’s just going to take a few weeks or a few months and everything will be just like it was.”

“Nice try, Mary Poppins,” I say to her. The tears that haven’t made their way out of my body seem to be congealing into a tight, hard ball in my chest. “But you know and I know that it will never be the same.”

“I refuse to know that right now. And so should you.” Rayne
gets up and starts poking at the cards and flowers that are set around the room. “You sure got a lot of stuff,” she says. “Too bad nobody likes you.”

I laugh, because the biggest and craziest bouquet of wild-flowers is from Rayne and her mom. “Yeah. All of a sudden I’m the most popular person around. I guess almost bleeding to death has an upside.”

“Must have been some mess,” Rayne says, and makes a face. I’ve been trying not to think about that too much. By the time I’d woken up in my hospital room, my clothes were gone, and I’ve been wearing this hospital gown and my robe ever since. I realize now that they were so covered in blood Mom probably threw them away.

“Who sent you bamboo?” Rayne asks, looking at a small red pot with some green stalks in it.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t remember seeing that before. Is there a card?”

Rayne peeks among the leaves. “Nope. This pot has three stalks growing in it. That means long life for Chinese people.”

“How do you know all this stuff anyway?”

Rayne shrugs. “You know cello. I know rocks and flowers.” She rubs a silky green leaf with her fingers. “Weird. I wonder who it’s from?”

Long life. And he’d said he’d been Chinese a few lifetimes ago. I smile, knowing exactly who the bamboo is from.

Gabi closes her locker with a bang and I jump. “Nervous?” she says, and laughs.

“No,” I say. “I was just thinking about something else.” All week, the smallest sound or movement out of the corner of my eye causes my heart to race, and I’ve been imagining I see Veronique everywhere.

“I think I know what that ‘something else’ is,” Rayne says. “Or, rather,
who
that some
one
else is.”

“Not true,” I say, automatically feeling for the outline of my phone in my pocket.

“Going to see him today?”

“No,” I said. “Probably not until tomorrow. I haven’t seen him since I got out of the hospital.”

“Well, it’s too bad you didn’t screw up your right hand,” Gabi
says, looking at the splint on my arm. “Then you wouldn’t have to do Ms. Lipke’s famous timed essay this afternoon.”

“I’m seriously beginning to hate that woman,” Rayne says. “Did she give you one first period?”

“Yup,” Gabi says. “Sixty minutes of writing on one of the books we’ve read so far. We did
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, so at least you know it won’t be that one.”

“I’m so not in the mood,” Rayne says. “It would almost be worth slitting my wrists to not have to do that today.” She looks at me. “Crap. Sorry. I didn’t mean for it to come out like that.”

“It’s okay.”

“See you guys later,” Gabi calls, rushing down the opposite hallway.

Just as the bell rings, I slip through the door of the orchestra room. I’ve felt so out of place here the past few days, just being able to watch and not join in. I start toward my usual chair on the end of the cello row, but then hesitate. I have no cello with me, and I can’t play even if I did. At the last second, I head toward the back of the room and settle into one of the stools near the percussion section.

“Nicole?” Steinberg asks, looking out over everyone as they get out their instruments and start tuning up. In addition to teaching me privately, he’s the orchestra director at school. I miss our afternoon sessions at the studio, but without being able to play, there’s no point in showing up. “You don’t have to sit back there, you know,” he says. “You can stay in your usual position as long as you like. Did the doctors say when you might be able to play again?”

I shake my head. “Awhile.” Despite the fact that the sounds of tuning echo through the room, I’m acutely aware that everyone in
the orchestra is paying attention to our conversation. Claire White ducks her head, pretending to concentrate on her bow, but I know she’s thinking the same thing that I am. “You should give my chair to Claire.” She’s sat next to me for the past three years, always ready for any challenge opportunity.

Steinberg glances back at my row. “You don’t need to decide that now—”

“I already did,” I say. “I’m no good to anybody at the moment. Claire deserves it. She’ll be great.”

“For now,” he says.

“For now,” I agree. “Then I’ll come and challenge to see if I can win it back. Someday.”

“Someday soon,” Steinberg says. He gives me a barely perceptible wink before walking briskly back to Claire to whisper in her ear.

Claire looks back at me, and I give her a little wave of encouragement as she slowly gets up and shifts her music onto my empty stand, the red spots of embarrassment on her cheeks almost matching the red in her hair. I keep my head up and look straight ahead as the rest of the row realizes what’s happened.

I sit motionless through warm-ups and Beethoven’s
Coriolan Overture
, a piece that I’ve played a thousand times before. The fingers on my left hand twitch as they sit mostly unfeeling, weakly mimicking every single note of a piece that I know deep down I may never play again. As the music from the orchestra cascades over the small room, I start to feel the now-familiar break from reality as a memory begins.

Strong hands hold me up by my arms as my legs buckle. My
face is wet with tears as I struggle to get the image of a broken Alessandra out of my mind. Signore Barone speaks to the policemen who crowd the rooftop in a language I’ve come to recognize as English, his eyes shining with tears as he points his finger repeatedly in my direction. They begin to jerk me roughly toward the stairs, their faces masks of disapproval and contempt as I begin to comprehend what’s happening
.

“I did nothing wrong!” I cry, panic filling my body, but the men holding me up obviously do not understand my pleas. “It wasn’t me! Please, won’t somebody listen? Won’t somebody listen to what really happened?”

“It can’t be!” Paolo cries, rushing through the door and onto the roof, pushing past us as if we are invisible. “They say she has fallen! Where is Alessandra?” His face is filled with pain and disbelief as he rushes to the crowd surrounding the edge of the roof, below which she lies broken and bloodied. He peers over the side of the building, then falls to his knees, his hands over his face and a guttural, keening sound coming from his throat. “She is not gone! She can’t be gone!” he cries over and over, rocking back and forth with the rhythm of his words as Signore Barone puts a protective hand on his shoulder
.

“Somebody help me!” I cry, but my words are useless as I am dragged roughly to the doorway. Paolo glances up as the door closes, his eyes gleaming with hatred
.

I look around the music room as the last notes from the Overture fade away, still filled with the panic I’d experienced that night on the roof. Alessandra died falling off the roof, and I was accused of doing it. My memories don’t go further than the stairwell, but
I somehow know after that night in that lifetime, I never played the cello again.

“It’s just so incredible,” Rayne says, taking a bite of the apple we swiped from the kitchen and pulling her books out of her backpack.

“Which part? The part where I lived in San Francisco over a hundred years ago? The part where I saw Alessandra dead? Or the part where I get hauled off by the police because they think I did it?”

I had to tell her. I know that Griffon said that we have to be careful, but this is Rayne we’re talking about. And I’m not telling her about the Akhet or the Sekhem, just about Alessandra. I can’t get the image of her lying on the ground out of my head. It took me a lifetime to remember it, and now I can’t manage to forget.

“You aren’t a murderer,” she says. “That I know for sure. You can’t be truly evil in one lifetime and then like you are now in this one.”

“So now you’re an expert?”

“Yes. I am. At least when it comes to this kind of thing.” Rayne opens her calculus book, but stares off into the distance. “I wonder who I was in a past life. Maybe Cleopatra. Or Amelia Earhart. That would have been cool.”

“Not everybody is a famous somebody,” I say. “I think most of us were just ordinary people doing ordinary things.”

“Well, somebody had to be famous in the past. Why not me?”

I manage a weak smile. “If anyone was famous in a past life, it would be you.”

“Thank you.” She gives a little bow. “If this all happened at some fancy house party, don’t you think there would be a lot of publicity? An Italian musician falling off the roof of a famous mansion would probably make the papers. I know they had papers back then. Do you have a clue when it was?”

“All I’ve seen is a ferry dock and some horses and carriages,” I say, starting to feel excited. “The late eighteen hundreds, maybe? Before the earthquake anyway, because everything still looked pretty good. There probably were a lot of papers back then.” I look at her. “It might have been in one.”

“Maybe we can look it up online,” Rayne says.

“Not everything is online,” I say. “There’s no way anyone is going to scan hundreds of years of newspapers. But they must have old copies downtown at the big library. Anytime someone needs to find something like this in the movies they end up in the basement of a library, searching through old yellow newspapers.” I look at her, hoping she’ll come with me. “How much homework have you got?”

“Not so much that I don’t want to go on a field trip right now.”

We usually go to the library by my house, so the last time I was at the new one downtown was on a field trip for the big opening back in ninth grade. As we walk through the doors and into the main space, I look up at the ceiling looming several stories above us.

“Jeez,” Rayne says. “I forgot how big this place is. It’s like one of those inside-out hotels where all of the rooms look out over the lobby.”

I stare at the flimsy-looking railings several stories up. “I sure hope they keep the newspapers in the basement.”

“How can I help you?” the librarian at the main desk asks as
we approach. She has short, dyed black hair and a nose ring. Trust us to get the only emo librarian in town.

“We need to see some old newspapers,” Rayne tells her.

“How old?”

Rayne looks at me. “Um,” I say, realizing I have no idea where to start. “Somewhere between 1870 and 1906.”